Reporting and opining upon political and scientific occurrences of interest to me, The Phantom.
This is my soapbox, and I'm standing on it.

Friday, February 17, 2017

Zuckerberg explains, "SHUT UP!!!"

At Slashdot today, it seems the Father of Facebook has some power user issues. He posted a large screed regarding the type of world he want to create using Farcebook, then edited something out of it. The idea that a software company can and should be deciding what kind of future we get is interesting in its own right, but the edit is even more interesting. Quoth the King of the Book of Faces:

The long term promise of AI is that in addition to identifying risks more quickly and accurately than would have already happened, it may also identify risks that nobody would have flagged at all — including terrorists planning attacks using private channels, people bullying someone too afraid to report it themselves, and other issues both local and global. It will take many years to develop these systems.

The original Mashable article notes that the revised version leaves out that bit about scanning private channels. Presumably because "private channels" are supposed to be, you know, private.

That Zuckerberg suggested AI could be used to monitor "private channels" in the same letter he used to praise WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption and the importance of protecting user privacy would seem to be at odds. There's a distinction between using AI to distinguish between propaganda and news coverage and using it to monitor private communication which, if taken at face value, would be counter to the CEO's stated desire in the letter to keep Facebook users safe without "compromising privacy."

My conclusion is that Marky has a major woody for centralized social control and top-down engineering. He's a Big Iron, time sharing, server side kinda guy. Make it nice on the surface for the stupid peasants, keep a big Ban Hammer handy for when the peasants get revolting.

Essentially, he wants Newspeak. You will not be able to express selected concepts on Farcebook. It will do what Twitter is doing: ban you for saying anything Marky decides you shouldn't be able to say.

No word on whether the system will also vector Predator gunships on your location, or plot a firing solution for FCC cruise missiles. That'll be version 2.0, probably.

The Retarded Phantom Retard. (That's sufficient to get me booted from Twitter right now.)